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Summer in Toronto gets hot, and at times like these the news feels hot too: death and destruction in Nice and Syria, one of the two major parties in the most powerful country in the world conducting a pseudo-authoritarian rage-a-thon in Cleveland, a coup attempt in Turkey. A movie star chased off Twitter by sexist and racist harassment. A man dead after a street fight. Too many subway cars without air-conditioning.

A newspaper columnist in Toronto opens his email inbox to see a response to a piece about pedestrian safety: “I hope you fall into an open sewer . . . ”

Closes inbox. Too hot.

There’s a small park on the water just a block away from the Star office, next to the Ferry Docks. Nothing fancy: some grass, some trees, the water’s edge. But I take a lunch and a cold drink there some days and sit at the foot of a tree in the shade, watch the sailboats drift pass, the ferry boats chug by, the planes zoom in low for landing. A tiny sparrow inches right up onto my foot, cocks its head this way and that, begging for a crust of bread. The waves come in and the clouds shift shapes in the great blue sky over the trees of the islands.

The heat is still there, in the world and at the office and radiating out of the concrete, but the park reminds you that life can still be pretty cool, too.

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Throughout my life I have, almost without thinking about it, escaped worry in parks across the city, large and small. The tiny postage stamp of a playground on Boulton Ave. that was a swinging and sliding pit stop between the work of school and the chores of home. Bluffer's Park at the foot of Brimley, just a wander away from the prying eyes of teachers and the incessant drama of teenage life at my high school — a place where the natural majesty of the white earth rising in peaks and cliffs takes your breath away. The sculpted, discrete gardens of Yorkville Park near Bloor and Bay, where I’d escape from the crushing minute-to-minute deadlines of life as a broke short-order cook to ponder the giant rock shipped in from up north and embedded in the ground.

I’ve been thinking about the importance of these places in the city, after hearing of the plan, championed by Councillor Joe Cressy, to buy or expropriate a parking lot on Richmond near John to build a new public park downtown, in the condo and entertainment district that’s sprung up over the past decade or two. It’s an expensive proposition; land in the area is worth tens of millions of dollars. This news comes after last year’s big reveal of a massive private donation to design and build a new public park under the Gardiner Expressway down in condoland — a particularly barren stretch of urban space surrounded by people’s homes and workplaces.

There are other, hotter priorities in the city — poverty, violence, transit service, gridlock. The money for the Richmond plan comes from a fund of developer fees specifically set aside for parkland, but it can be easy to consider the idea a little frivolous, or at least low-priority.

But I remember when Corktown Common opened a few years ago, how stunned everyone was by its magnificence in an area of the city that had been barren. I remember how executives from Waterfront Toronto, who had built it, told me that it was a key attraction drawing builders and residents to a new neighbourhood that is now taking shape.

I remember on a family vacation to New York City last year, spending almost half our time in various parks and playgrounds that turned out to be every bit as memorable as the museums and skyscrapers.

I remember talking to Mike Labbé, president of Options for Homes, who builds condominiums in Toronto specifically to be affordable to working-class families. He told me that it was essential for him to build them in places with fantastic local amenities and, especially, parks, because without backyards people would need ready use of public spaces to make their homes livable. They help define the city as a place you can live in. A place you want to live in.

In the heat of the summer, this week, you could go to parks around the city and see Little League baseball championships, community cookouts, fishers and gardeners and runners, sunbathers laying about, hipsters sitting around, actors working scenes, Pokémon players GO-ing, classical musicians performing. Or you could just lean against a tree, eat your lunch, and watch the clouds roll past.

It’s still hot. Bring sunscreen, and wear a hat. But I recommend maybe leaving the news behind, just for a while, just to cool off for a few moments.

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